Civil Society Organizations, Social Media, and Public Attention

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This project aims to explain how non-profit organizations, advocacy groups, social movement organizations and other civil society organizations attract public attention via social media. Though hundreds of thousands of organizations produce social media messages each day, only a small fraction of these "go viral" and reach broad segments of social media users beyond their core audience. To explain this process, this project develops a novel theory that combines insights from cultural sociology, social psychology, and social network theory. The project develops an innovative app-based technology in order to examine this theory. Organizations will be recruited to use this new technology to study traffic to their Facebook pages. This project produces an aggregate database that enables civil society organizations to learn from the successes and failures of their peers in attracting visitors. The organizations will share their data in order to produce what will be the largest study of how organizations reach new audiences via social media to date. This new methodology will enable, safe, efficient transmission of very large amounts of high quality social science data and provides a cost effective mechanism to address declining survey response rates that also provides a public good.The study's unique research design will directly benefit civil society organizations that participate by providing them with analysis of how they might reach new audiences online. The project will also produce a very large dataset of multiple years of interaction between hundreds of organizations and hundreds of millions of people that will enable analysis of a broad range of variables related to collective behavior, cultural sociology, social psychology, and social networks. And the study will provide mentorship and professional opportunities and training for graduate student research assistants.